Spurious

By Lars Iyer

W., the sneering star of Lars Iyer's viciously funny "Spurious," is not a sentimental man, but when the subject turns to the novel's narrator (also named Lars), he has an atypical fondness for recounting the earliest days of their relationship.

"Your idiocy was spectacular," W. tells Lars.

They're the closest of friends.

Writers with no small amount of success - they publish books on philosophy, speak at intellectual confabs - W. and Lars are, from time to time, serious thinkers who ponder life's ineffable mysteries. They discuss - or at least give lip service to - Tarkovsky's films and Kafka's novels. They try to solve the puzzles of higher mathematics and religious faith. They use terms like "adamantine apocalypticism" and argue about the merits of text "at the level of style" versus "the level of content."

Mostly, however, they talk about themselves. More specifically, W. does most of the talking, Lars the listening, their conversations a scathing catalog of all the ways that the latter is pathetic, simpleminded and altogether useless.

According to W., Lars is overweight, revels in self-pity, lives in a terrible apartment and fails to grasp new concepts because he's never had an original idea of his own. Lars lacks self-discipline and he's a terrible facsimile of a loyal confidant, W. says, his wardrobe an abomination and his reading habits an embarrassment.

But W. reserves his most scathing - and hysterical - commentary for his friend's writing projects.

"He can picture me, W. says, working at my desk, or attempting to work (or at least what I call work)," Lars recalls of one such conversation, "... surrounded by books by Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and by other books that explain Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and then by still other books with titles like 'The Idiot's Guide to Jewish Messianism' and 'Rosenzweig in Sixty Minutes.' "

Lars, W. suggests, should instead devote his efforts to a more personal project: "Write about the history of your humiliations. ... Write about dragging the rest of us down. Write about spoiling it for everyone, because that's what you've done."

And should Lars not live as long as W., he can rest easy knowing that his work is in the hands of a sympathetic ally: "When I die, W. says, he's going to be my literary executor. Delete, delete, delete, that's what he's going to do."

What exactly has Lars done to deserve a friend who serves as his personal character assassin? That's tough to say, as Iyer, a first-time novelist and a philosophy professor in Britain, doesn't divulge more than the absolute minimum about his two protagonists. We know that they work at opposite ends of England, that they drink a fair amount of alcohol, and that their work occasionally involves joint trips to conferences in various European cities, where they give "collaborative presentations." We know that W.'s home is overrun by books that he probably won't get around to writing about, that Lars' damp apartment is a breeding ground for fungi - the spread of which may or may not be analogous to a broader societal and cultural decline that W. terms "the last days."

Otherwise, there are virtually no complementary characters and very little action. There's almost no plot either, save for a few passing mentions of the duo's search for a "new leader," an intellectual force who will give meaning to their work. Would you volunteer for this task? Neither would I. And so in the absence of the cerebral structure they claim to desire, W. directs his energies to knocking Lars.

Befitting men who ponder existential questions, W. and Lars are alone on these pages, left to consider the ramifications of their own existence. W. is not a fan of humanity itself, or his place in it, but he takes solace in his belief that he's bested at least one of his peers. As Lars puts it, "If W.'s on his dung heap perched up and looking around like a meerkat, he says, I'm still playing in the dung."

Amid the excrement hides a true kinship, one that leaves Lars with no illusions about the kind of support he'll receive: "Above all, W. says, I should earnestly work on another book. It's the only way I experience my own inadequacy, he says. He knows me: without some project, I'll become far too content. My idiocy will become an alibi, an excuse, which is just a way to avoid it altogether."